Saturday, May 30, 2015

Earlier this week, Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin gave the fourth annual Pluralism Lecture of the Global Centre for Pluralism, founded in 2006 by the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims.

"Peter Russell, a political science
professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, said that Chief Justice
McLachlin shares with virtually all Supreme Court judges since a
landmark rights case in 1990 'a tremendous sense of sorrow about the
denial of very fundamental rights to Canada’s native people'."

"Chief
Justice McLachlin, who has been on the court since 1989 and chief since
2000, is its longest-serving chief justice. She cited early laws
barring treaty Indians from leaving reservations, rampant starvation and
disease and the denial of the right to vote."

"She
also pointed to the outlawing of aboriginal religious and social
traditions, such as the potlatch and the sun dance, and to residential
schools, in which children who had been taken from their parents were
forbidden to speak their native languages, forced to wear white man’s
clothing, forced to observe Christian religious practices and sometimes
subjected to sexual abuse."

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